The policy paradox at the heart of Bangladesh's digital finance story

Bangladesh stands at a critical inflection point in its digital financial services (DFS) journey. Agent banking and mobile financial services (MFS) have transformed the country's financial landscape, taking formal transactions to millions of households and building one of the most extensive last-mile service architectures in South Asia.

Today, MFS channels  operate through over 1.5 million agents and support more than 200 million registered accounts, while agent banking has grown to over 16,000 agents and more than 21,000 outlets serving customers across all districts. Yet within this achievement lies a structural imbalance: Bangladesh Bank has mandated that 50% of agent-banking representatives must be women, while fewer than 3% of the country's MFS agents, the channel that handles the lion's share of daily cash-in, cash-out, remittance, and G2P transactions, are female.

This mismatch is more than policy oversight; it represents a deeper market design challenge. The gender mandate applies only to the smaller, slower-growing agent-banking channel, while the much larger MFS ecosystem remains almost entirely male. Women now hold 42% of the total 239.3 million registered MFS accounts, yet have almost no representation among the frontline providers who shape trust, privacy, grievance resolution, and usage. Representation at the last mile is not symbolic; it determines whether women can transact confidently and independently. 

What appears to be a simple representation gap is, in reality, a question of whether the architecture of Bangladesh's digital economy is built to recognise women as full economic actors. It echoes a broader global ambition to advance women's empowerment, expand decent and dignified work, and strengthen inclusive, resilient digital infrastructure (SDG 5, SDG 8, SDG 9). And it raises a fundamental question: Can a digital economy be truly inclusive if women are consumers but not providers of financial services?

Why women agents matter 

The absence of women at the frontline reinforces gender gaps in trust, privacy, and confidence-patterns consistently observed in global evidence from India, Nigeria, and East Africa, as well as in recent women-led agent pilots in Bangladesh. Female agents build trust, improve customer retention, and help convert dormant or irregular women users into active ones, while reaching segments male agents often struggle to serve: young women, new mothers, informal entrepreneurs, and socially restricted female household members.

They also strengthen operational reliability, with lower churn and higher adherence to service standards, directly benefiting providers. Most importantly, women agents expand women's economic agency, offering one of the most accessible pathways into formal entrepreneurship, digital capability, and income generation.  

The constraint stack

Women's exclusion from MFS agent networks is not driven by a lack of interest or capability; it stems from how the wider financial and retail ecosystem is structured. The MFS agent model in Bangladesh was built around male-owned retail shops, high-mobility cash cycles, and regulatory frameworks that do not monitor or incentivise gender-balanced networks. These sector wide design features interact with women's lived realities-mobility constraints, discomfort in male-run environments, lower smartphone access, and household negotiations around public-facing work to produce a pipeline that few women can enter and even fewer can sustain. In effect, the system functions as if women were never intended to be agents. 

The table that follows breaks these constraints down into the structural touchpoints where the exclusion becomes most visible:

Beyond the myths: Interrogating provider assumptions

Provider concerns about onboarding women agents: liquidity pressure, footfall, security risks, and training costs are rooted in practical realities. But these issues are not isolated barriers; they are symptoms of a wider lifecycle design that was built around male norms. At every stage of the agent journey i.e. selection, onboarding, training, day-to-day operations, and long-term sustainability, the system assumes a male agent: one with high mobility, ownership of formal retail space, access to documentation, and freedom to engage in public-facing commercial activity. When these assumptions go unquestioned, women appear "unsuitable," when in reality the model itself is exclusionary.

The belief that "women don't apply" simply mirrors limited entry pathways: providers recruit through male retail networks and offer training environments misaligned with women's mobility and safety needs. Concerns about commercial viability assume that only market-center, high-footfall outlets are profitable; yet women-led outlets in community settings often deliver higher trust, deeper engagement, and lower churn, key drivers of sustainable profitability.

Liquidity challenges attributed to women arise from an operating model that depends on constant mobility. Once that model is adapted through micro-float credit lines, shared liquidity pools, or periodic cash-support women manage liquidity as effectively as men. And while onboarding women may require more tailored support at the outset, women agents consistently exhibit stronger compliance, lower misconduct, and greater operational stability, which reduce supervisory costs over time.

The evidence is consistent across markets: the perceived weaknesses of women agents are, in fact, weaknesses in a system that was never designed with women in mind. When the operating model shifts even slightly to reflect women's realities, the business case strengthens rather than weakens.
Cross-country learning: What Bangladesh can actually borrow

Bangladesh is not alone in grappling with a stark gender gap in agent networks. Several countries have already experimented with ways to bring more women into frontline roles, and while contexts differ, three concrete lessons stand out from documented practice.

First, dedicated women-agent pipelines work when they are built through existing women's networks.

In India's BC Sakhi programme, state rural livelihood missions identify self-help group (SHG) members and train them as banking correspondents to serve their own communities. The "One Gram Panchayat, One BC Sakhi" mission in Uttar Pradesh has onboarded tens of thousands of women as village-level banking agents and channeled millions of transactions and significant commission income to them. This model shows that when recruitment is routed through women's collectives, ot just existing retail shops, women agents emerge at scale and are able to serve as a trusted financial touchpoint in rural areas.

Second, access to working capital and liquidity support is a binding constraint but is a solvable problem.

Research on female cash-in, cash-out agents in Nigeria highlights that women's ability to become or remain agents is heavily shaped by their access to startup capital and ongoing float, even when they have the skills and demand exists in their communities. The MicroSave study argues for bundled solutions: appropriate credit, business support, and liquidity tools tailored to women. Similarly, work on DFS agents in Indonesia shows that lending to agents using their digital transaction history as a basis represents a large, under-tapped opportunity and suggests that structured working-capital products for agents can strengthen network performance overall. While not always designed exclusively for women, these experiences demonstrate that capital and float are design variables, not fixed barriers: when providers and lenders intentionally create agent-focused credit solutions, entry for women becomes more feasible.

Third, there is evidence that women agents change how customers use and trust digital finance.

Experimental and observational work from African markets shows that women often express higher levels of trust when interacting with female agents and may be more willing to share information or seek help in such settings. Studies on agent banking find that women appear more willing to engage with other women in transactional settings, suggesting that the availability of female agents can increase comfort and uptake among female customers. These findings are consistent with global work on women's digital financial inclusion, which emphasises that representation at the frontline is a key factor in moving from account ownership to active, confident usage.

Taken together, these experiences do not offer a single template that Bangladesh can copy, but they do point to three robust design principles:
•    build women-agent pipelines through women's organisations and livelihood networks;
•    treat working capital and liquidity as solvable design problems, not reasons to exclude women; and
•    recognise that women agents can materially shift trust and usage patterns, especially for women customers.

Policy roadmap: Building a gender-inclusive agent network for Bangladesh

Bangladesh can break the <3% barrier in women's MFS agents, but only with a coordinated shift in policy, provider design, and ecosystem partnerships. Three strategic levers matter most.

1. Regulatory realignment: Introduce gender-responsive MFS agent guidelines, require sex-disaggregated agent reporting, and extend the spirit of the agent-banking mandate to digital channels. Simplify KYC and licensing for home-adjacent women-run outlets and incentivise providers through supervisory nudges tied to network diversity, safety, and service quality.

2. Provider-level design shifts: Recruit through women-focused networks i.e. MFIs, NGOs, SHGs rather than male retail channels. Deploy gender-sensitive training, safe training venues, and community-based outlet models. Introduce agent working-capital tools (micro-float credit lines, shared liquidity pools) and redesign incentives to reward trust, compliance, and customer retention.

3. Ecosystem investments: Fund district-scale demonstration pilots, blended-finance guarantees for women-agent float, along with digital- and business-literacy pathways. Partner with women-centric MFIs to identify, onboard, and mentor women agents at scale.

A gender-inclusive agent network is not a social add-on; it is core digital infrastructure for Bangladesh's next stage of financial inclusion.

Rebuilding inclusion from the frontline

Bangladesh's digital finance journey shows that access alone does not produce inclusion; the architecture of participation matters. Women are central to the digital economy as users and earners yet structurally absent from the frontline. Rebalancing this requires redesigning recruitment, capital support, and incentives so that women can participate not as exceptions, but as a standard part of the agent network.

Alvina Zafar is Team Leader at MSC Consulting Bangladesh Ltd. She is a development finance professional with over a decade of experience in financial inclusion, digital finance, microfinance, SME finance, and women's economic empowerment across Bangladesh and East Africa.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard